Friday, June 3, 2016

The most commonly cited
aspect of Weber’s definition of the state is that it possesses a monopoly on
the legitimate use of force. The accent of the phrase falls on “legitimate.”
Obviously, private individuals continue to use physical force in various ways;
the point is that such force lacks legitimacy. To use force without the
authorization of the state is criminal.

But Weber doesn’t talk about
the legitimate use of force as something simply and once-and-for-all secured to
the state. He writes, rather, of “The claim of the modern state to monopolize
the use of force”—a phrasing that introjects a lot more uncertainty into the
issue. A claim is just a claim; it is as good as one’s ability to enforce it.
He elsewhere writes that the state “lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate
physical violence within a certain territory.” Here, the tense of claims making
is open, iterative; the state is only a state to the extent that it
continuously lays claim to this monopoly. It lays claim to this monopolized
violence by enacting its violence.

There’s an important
flipside to all of this, though: the state’s claim to the monopoly of
legitimate violence functions through an expropriation
of violence from non-state actors. It is as a result of this expropriation that
violence becomes riven by a binary—legitimate and illegitimate—that did not
preexist this process. The idea that non-state actors might commit political
violence becomes almost a contradiction in terms; only the polity, as the
state, can legitimately commit such violence. Only the state can have its
violence modified by the adjective “political.” Moreover, this process of
expropriation is just as iterative and ongoing as the state’s constant claim to
its monopoly. The hyper-violent state operates by depriving its subjects of
their capacity for political violence. It works to render such a capacity for
violence unthinkable.

The state’s ongoing
expropriation of subjects’ capacity for political violence: this process is
important to keep in mind when we consider the “violence” that occurred at the
Trump rally in San Jose. The line taken by liberals has been predictable.
Jamelle Bouie, for instance, tweeted, “Nothing good comes from political
violence, period.” Obviously, the claim is falsifiable by many, many historical
examples. Not so obviously, the violence complained of here is less the use of
physical objects or fist fighting and more the plebian violation of the
administered normal. It’s basically a deontological argument masked as a
consequentialist one.

I’m more interested in a
line I’ve heard from people on the left. It goes something like this: Violence like this is probably
inefficacious. Yet, if you insist on the possibility of using some form of
physical violence as necessary for antifascist political work, your level of
violence is laughably inadequate to the threat you claim to be responding to.
The implication of such a line is that a) the object we’re attacking isn’t
actually fascism, or we would be attacking with greater vehemence, b) most of
the political violence we’ve seen (regardless of whether it should be called
violence) amounts to enactments of manarchist fantasies detached from concrete political
realities and c) stop doing this shit.

It’s pretty interesting,
really. I think we have broad swaths of the U.S. left that are not normatively
anti-violence but who also would be reluctant to accept that any single
instance of political violence—a smashed window, a thrown egg—has any positive
effect. From this perspective, the proof of the pudding comes in the scalable
effects of any single instance of political violence: a thrown egg didn’t
defeat fascism, so throwing the egg was at best an ineffectual gesture. A
smashed window didn’t end capitalism. The point always boils down to the
obvious: we are not at a revolutionary conjuncture in which such acts might
turn into anything. (The implication for many is that we never will be.)

This is why turning to
Weber, and his narrative of the state’s ongoing expropriation of political
violence from ordinary people, is important. Very simply, we’ve been made dumb
about violence. Over the past century, the massive expansion of what counts as
“violence”— in the liberal, Chris Hedges, finger-wagging sense—is staggering.
The definition of violence is itself a very important political weapon: such
definitions encode and reproduce the value-relations of our world. Liberals
clutch pearls over smashed glass; the enforced displacement of humans called
gentrification, not so much. More to my point, the expansion of the term’s
ambit inversely correlates to its expropriation from the political repertoire of
ordinary, non-state actors. A large part of this expropriation of violence has
been bound up with the material recomposition of classes and the state through
the twentieth century. The unions have been gutted that could (and did) more or
less wage small wars against state-backed companies; meanwhile, police forces
have been augmented in all the ways we know about. A significant part of this
expropriation of violence also registers at the level of ideology and the
formation of a collective corporeal habitus. We’ve been trained to feel like
our bodies, and our modes of extending them, cannot have effects on the
political and economic structures that require dismantling. Fascism, after all,
didn’t vanish with that thrown egg.

Consequentialist approaches
to small acts of political violence—if violence is even the proper term—are
complicit with the state’s expropriation of violence to the extent that they
induce a feeling that our bodies are always already incapacitated to impact the
political, to violate its administered normal. The idea that political violence
only makes sense in conditions of a full-blown revolutionary conjuncture
obfuscates the fact that re-appropriating political violence from the state is
a necessary condition for anything like a revolution to occur. This process of
re-appropriation takes time, and is intimately bound up with the revolutionary
process. These small acts are moments of collective self-pedagogy where subjects learn, slowly and haltingly but truly, what our bodies can do, and
what they can do without the state-form. They are an organic part of the
process of communizing the monopolized violence of the state and its
racist-fascoid fanboys.

Fascism didn't vanish with that thrown egg, but it will never have vanished if it hadn't been thrown.